by Kim Oh
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PART ONE
Women make the best killers. They’re just not as damned sentimental as guys.
– Cole’s Book of Wisdom
ONE
Money smells pervy.
I mean, if you pile up enough of it. That’s what I was thinking when I parked the rental car and walked up the long, winding drive to the house. Mansion, really, if you want to use an old-fashioned word. You could put together all the places I’ve lived, including the whole apartment buildings, and they wouldn’t be as big as this place.
The driveway glowed in the dark. Seriously – it had some kind of high-tech luminescent material mixed in with the regular gravel, that gave off a creepy blue. The latest thing, if you can afford it. My hands looked cold and bloodless as a corpse’s in the dim light. The stuff was probably carcinogenic to the max, made in some hellhole factory in China, where peoples’ faces fall off like pink baggies after a couple of months from whatever chemicals they were exposed to. But it was all worth it if it gave rich people something to spend their money on.
That’s what I mean about lots of money having a funky odor. For me, and you probably, it just smells like groceries and paying the rent. For this guy Heathman who I’d come here to see, and his friends, people like him . . . it’s something else curling inside your nostrils.
He actually answered the door. The intercom, that is, a minute or so after I’d pushed the brass button beside the big oak panels. If there’d been two people my size standing there waiting, one of us could’ve stood on the other one’s shoulders like a circus act and still not been able to reach the top of them.
“Yeah?” Baritone voice, gruff as though I’d interrupted something important. “Who is it?”
“It’s Kim, Mister Heathman.” I leaned close to the intercom grille. “Kim Oh. We talked on the phone.”
“Oh, right. I remember. Hang on, I’ll be right up.”
I guessed that meant he was in the basement. God knew what he had down there. Maybe a wine cellar crated up, stone by moldy old stone, from some sixteenth-century French chateau and air-shipped here to Los Angeles. Complete with cobwebs thick as wool sweaters and the skeleton of some naughty servant girl chained to the wall. Authenticity’s very big in L.A.
That left me standing there and waiting. The night air had me sweating inside my business-lady jacket. This was hot for the end of March, even by Southern California standards. The kinda matching slacks made my legs itch, but I’d gone with them rather than a skirt just because I didn’t like showing off the scar along my left leg. I’d gotten that from all the brouhaha I’d gone through out on the freeway a couple months ago. It was fading, and looked a lot better than when the stitches had been fresh, but I suppose there’ll always be something of a pale line there.
You don’t have to tell me that this is how a lot of stories begin – a person in my line of work coming to see some rich guy – and then a lot of bad things happen. I’d had enough of that sort of thing for a while. I was glad I was just here for a piece-of-cake job with a nice paycheck attached. That last bit I really could use right now.
The huge doors opened up, letting a wedge of light fall across me. I winced and blinked, vaguely aware of the broad-shouldered silhouette in the high-ceilinged foyer.
“Come on in.” The doors opened wider as Heathman stepped back a bit. “You’re right on time. I like that.”
I was pretty sure that somebody with as much bucks as him didn’t wait for many people. Waiting’s for people like you and me.
He fumbled with the doorknob as I stepped inside. That was because his large, wide-fingered hand held a tumbler half-full with ice cubes and what looked like slightly diluted Scotch. His other hand was occupied by a big black gun.
This wasn’t the first time I’d been greeted by somebody packing. A lot of the people I deal with are in the habit of answering the door with a loaded piece in their grip, cocked and ready to roll. One guy I’d worked with wouldn’t even go out to check his mailbox without a street-sweeper shotgun tucked down his pants leg. You stay in this business long enough, then it’s not paranoia, just common sense.
As my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see the Ruger eagle on the side of Heathman’s piece, an LCR .38 with some kind of tricky laser sight mounted on top of the barrel. I also could see the set of ear protectors slung around his bull neck, big ones like you’d see on some airport guy semaphoring the jetliners up to the terminal with a pair of red flashlights. Which explained where he’d been when I’d pushed the intercom buzzer – he hadn’t been downstairs dusting off his vintage Cabernets, but popping off a few rounds instead, in some fancy private shooting range.
Must be nice. I’d had to learn how to handle a gun in some funky warehouse down by the wharves. By the time I could come even close to hitting my target, I was just about deaf, since Cole – the guy who’d first gotten me into all this – didn’t figure that real hit men went around with hearing protection on their heads. Of course he had been right about that, just as he’d been with everything about killing people.
“Come on –” He gestured with the Ruger. “Let’s go someplace we can talk.”
His place looked like a five-star hotel lobby as he led me through it. The kind of layout, with the type of stuff in it – the furniture, the art on the walls – that comes when somebody with lots of money tells the decorators to do whatever they want, as long as it looks expensive. On the butch side, nothing too foofy. From what I’d managed to Google on him, I knew his wife had died about ten years or so ago. Nothing sinister to it, just a long bout of pancreatic cancer. Without somebody like her around, the place could’ve been furnished in wooden crates with thousand-dollar bills stapled to them, and it probably would’ve been all the same to him.
An elevator, all mirrors and chrome inside, took us down below. I could smell the shooting range even before the door slid open.
I didn’t like the looks of it. There’s something so . . . unprofessional about having a wet bar at the back of a shooting range. Especially one as fully stocked as this guy’s. Alcohol and guns – what could go wrong? Granted, back when he’d still been alive, my man Cole ran a pretty sloppy setup – but he lived that stuff. Some high-caliber gun was like a toothbrush, something you used every day – and had been just about as threatening to him. Whereas Heathman was obviously an amateur with enough money to buy all the ugly toys he wanted.
“Want one?” He held up the Scotch bottle after he’d refilled his own glass.
“No thanks.” I looked away from the punctured targets at the far end of the range and back to him. “This is still kinda working hours for me.”
“Suit yourself.” He sauntered over to the gun rack that filled the long side wall. “Wanna see something cool?”
I didn’t have a choice about it. Heathman took down one of the bigger pieces and laid it in my hands. “What is it?” Some kind of assault rifle obviously, but I didn’t recognize the model, and there wasn’t any manufacturer ID anywhere on it.
“Prototype.” Ice cubes rattled as he gestured toward the weapon with his glass. “I’ve got a ten percent roll-out stake in a little start-up in Slovenia. That baby’s got some wild tech in it. Striated carbon fiber down the inside of the barrel – just about doubles your muzzle velocity. They had to smuggle that out to me in their embassy’s
diplomatic pouch – it’s the only one outside of Eastern Europe, least until they go public.”
“Okay.” I shrugged, still weighing the short-snouted rifle in my palms. Money talk – big money talk – generally didn’t mean much to me. “That’s nice, I guess.”
One of the bushy eyebrows on his red, sweating face lifted a little. “I would’ve thought you’d be more into this kind of thing. Heard all kinds of stuff about how you handled yourself when that whole freeway mishegas came down.”
Another shrug. “I just used what was there. That’s all.”
“Yeah . . . that’s what I heard, all right.” He took a long sip from his glass, regarding me even more closely over its rim. “Too bad you couldn’t do anything for your boss Karsh. Getting slammed into the side of a building, then dropped to the street – that’s kind of a rough way to go.”
I wasn’t going to point out that as far as I was concerned, Karsh had pretty much got what was coming to him.
“Technically, I wasn’t working for him anymore.” I laid the assault rifle down on one of the range benches. “He’d already decided to fire me.”
“I can understand why he’d want to do that.” Heathman had an ugly smile. “People you work for have a habit of dying on your watch.”
“All right.” A real short movie played inside my head, of a paycheck with lots of zeroes on it, fluttering off into the clouds on a pair of little angel wings. “Thanks for showing me your firing range – it’s really nice – and thanks for offering me a drink. I’m sure I would’ve enjoyed it. But if you had me come out here just to tell me why you’re not hiring me . . . you know you could’ve done that by email.”
That I was a little annoyed, you can probably pick up on by now. I really don’t like having my time wasted, especially when I’ve got bills to pay. Plus, I didn’t think it was exactly fair to blame me for my old bosses getting killed, especially when it’d been me who’d done it. You can’t really call that negligence on my part, right?
“Oh, I’m hiring you, Miss Oh. Don’t worry about that.” He drained his glass. “You come highly recommended.”
“Yeah?” That worried me a bit. People like me tend to consider publicity a negative. “By who?”
“Oh . . .” His turn to shrug. “People. You know. Friends of mine.”
“One of them wouldn’t happen to be one of them named Morton, would he?”
“Morton?” He frowned in puzzlement. “I don’t know anybody named Morton. Not to talk to, at least. Not about you.”
I didn’t know whether I believed him or not. Somebody had steered him on to me, told him that I could handle whatever he was thinking about. This was a little mystery that had been going on lately for me. Ever since that whole freeway episode, this Morton person had been leaving text messages on my phone, something about wanting to line up some kind of business for me – and I had no idea who he was. Or how he’d gotten my number. Which is why I hadn’t gotten back in touch with him, or at least not yet. I didn’t like the idea of someone even knowing what my business was. Granted, maybe the guy was just some Amway recruiter, or some other kind of scam artist cold-calling phone numbers, and had no idea who was on the other end. Frankly, I wouldn’t like that any better.
What I really didn’t like, though, was being unemployed and out of money. God knows, I hadn’t liked Karsh – if there’d been anybody who had, I would’ve been amazed – but running his security operations had been a gig, at least. And not a bad-paying one; I still had a little money left in the bank. Enough to pack up my brother Donnie and the stuff we’d brought out here to L.A., and get us back East. That’s where all my contacts were. I’d have a better chance of scuffling up something there than anywhere else.
But still . . . I wasn’t quite ready to leave this place. There was something nice about being able to get warm without wrapping your arms around the radiator and hoping the building janitor would crank on the furnace in the basement.
And the people were so pretty. That was nice, too. And they knew they were, so they weren’t all grim and angry – at least not all the time – the way they were everywhere else I’d had to live. So it was possible, even for somebody like me – un-blond, un-tall, un-stacked – to sit out on the patio of some expensive coffee place on Santa Monica Boulevard, with that buttery sun pouring down on me, wearing huge dark glasses and pretending to be good-looking, too. A girl can dream . . .
Lately, my brother Donnie had been really getting into that K-pop music, streaming all kinds of Korean girl groups onto the laptop I got him a while back. Nice to know that the Internet is good for something besides lolcat videos. Plus maybe I could tell those Child Protective Services people that this way he was being exposed to Korean culture, and this would get them off my back for a while, about how he was being raised. Big favorite of his being four girls calling themselves 2NE1 – which I kind of got into as well. Hey, a couple of those girls are so tiny they make me look like an Amazon. But there was this one song of theirs, called “Ugly,” that I’d only listen to late at night, after Donnie was asleep. I’d sneak the laptop out of his bedroom and set it on the kitchen counter with the on-screen volume slider drawn almost down to zero, and I’d lean over it with my ear close to those little tiny speakers because I didn’t want to wake him up . . .
Weird thing was that it’s a Korean pop song, but a lot of the lyrics are in English. Then again, a lot of the girls in those groups are born right here in Los Angeles, either in the district near Wilshire and Western that everybody calls K-Town, or out in the San Fernando Valley – so go figure. But anyway, I could just make out one of the girls in this group singing how ugly she felt, how no one would ever love her, how she wished she was pretty the way some other girl was. Of course, that kind of stuff coming from a quartet of absolutely adorable K-pop singers just goes to show how screwed up all our brains are. And why should somebody like me, who kills people for a living, even care? But there you go – I do. And that was why I wasn’t ready just yet to leave L.A.
And that also was why I was glad when this Heathman guy got hold of me, with his piece-of-cake job offer. It wasn’t just the money. Or not going back East and freezing to death. It was something else.
Running over all this in my head made it easier to deal with Heathman, down there in his private shooting range.
“So do I meet her first?” I figured there was no point in poking around any further, about how I’d been recommended to him. Whether it was that mysterious Morton person who’d been leaving messages for me, or some other connection – what did it matter? “I mean, meet her here? Or am I supposed to hook up with her down there?”
“I figured the two of you would fly down together. That work for you?” Heathman set his empty glass down on the wet bar. There were four or five others just like it, the ice cubes melted to faintly brown-tinged water. “Come on, let’s go back upstairs. The two of you might as well get acquainted now.”
It was a relief to take the elevator back up to the house’s main floor. I had started feeling creepy again about being there in the shooting range. A lot of guys with the bucks to have a set-up like that – I’ve met a few – they use it like their little clubhouse. Have some buddies over, knock back a few beers, blow away some paper targets – all that good male-bonding stuff that smells like the sweaty white socks left too long in a gym locker. But there hadn’t been any sign that Heathman used his that way. Just him down there by himself with his ugly toys, working his way through an ice bucket and a bottle of single malt. His face turning redder and brighter with his sour perspiration, as he brooded over his dark, rich-guy thoughts . . .
“I think she’s out by the pool.” He led me through the empty house, switching the lights on in room after enormous room. “Yeah, there she is.”
We’d come to a glass door, already slid partly open. The warm night air was sticky-sweet with some kind of jasmine. The house’s elaborate gardens rolled out toward the twinkling city lights at the bottom of the hills
thick with eucalyptus and English ivy. Liquid-y blue light from an infinity-edged swimming pool wavered across our faces.
A hinged chaise longue, laid out flat, was surrounded by empty patio chairs. A leggy young blonde, luminous-skinned in a bitty two-piece, stretched out on her stomach, idly flipping the pages of some fashion magazine.
“Hey, Lynndie –” Heathman slid the glass open wider. “Come inside – there’s somebody here I want you to meet.”
She came in, tightening the sash of a white terrycloth robe, the big heavy kind they give people at those hotels that are way too expensive for people like you and me to stay at. A bored, pouty expression, as though she were slightly irritated about being roused from some wordless, expensive dream. Even with that, she was absolutely gorgeous, exactly the kind of money-buffed twenty-year-old that somebody like me would never see in the mirror, at least not while I was awake.
“So you’re this Kim, huh?” Her father must’ve told her about the plans he’d made. She shook her damp, golden hair from her shoulders. “And you’re going to be my babysitter.”